Graph Paper Games

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my last session of Bash had not gone as well as I liked because my single story, which I had hoped to fill the entire session, had ended prematurely.  So this time I decided on a slew of smaller subplots and just adjust accordingly. It was a good thing, too, because I ended up having a full boat: all nine players in the campaign showed up for this session.  Of note (to me, at least) was that this was the first session in a very long time where we played back in the basement game room of my house.  I'm not sure I've been down there since I separated from my wife six months ago.  For that matter I also made my classic pulled pork for dinner, so the whole thing felt like Old Home Week for me, and that's a good thing.  Now how did the gaming session go? Prologue: Quick, to the Bat-Fax! The New Defenders have defeated Stardust, but are frustrated to find a groundswell of support for the murderous alien, especially from a Super...

There are times when I think to myself, "you know, you could have done a better job being a GM that time."  Last Friday was one of those times. In my defense, after literally having no one show up for the previous June session, I went from having four, to three, to two, then back up to four people signed up for last Friday's session.  When it was down to two, I scuttled the whole thing and stopped planning.  Then, literally the day of the gaming session, two people pop up as planning to attend, and I'm scrambling for content. And with a game whose dice mechanic can be as jammy as Bash can be, that meant that we were done way earlier than I thought, and I didn't have much in the way of fallback material.  Like I said, a less-than-superlative job there. It reminded me why I dislike doing "story" style gaming, because there is always the issue of timing: sometimes you get four-fifths of the way through the story and you've gone way long in the se...

Wow, it has been six weeks since my last post.  Well, a lot has been going on.  A ton of person transitions, some vacation time, etc.  But that's not what this blog is about. Over the last six weeks, my friend John wrapped up his West End Games Star Wars campaign.  I'll admit that I wasn't in as many sessions as I might have liked--another consequence of my many responsibilities these days.  This campaign started as a closed game with a limited number of players but slowly creeped up to around seven or eight.  That's on the high side, and a lot of overlap between certain characters started to show (e.g. who flew the ship). In the final episode the GM decided to split the party.  This is always a gamble, and I'm not sure if it paid off.  This wasn't the fault of the GM, but rather the fickle hand of fate (and some decision making on the part of the players).  The first half managed to handle their scenario in a very brief period of time, ...

I was looking over my blog posts and thought, "I haven't written since March ?  Did I even run something this month?"  And sure enough, I had, but had not written a gaming recap. I suspect part of that was because it was a brief gaming session that didn't move the needle a lot except introduce the group to the archtypical Evil Billionaire Genius Supervillain and throw down with a bunch of supervillain flunkies (the eponymous Vicious Circle).  What was good about the session was some solid roleplaying with the villain and some very clever group tactics in the combat.  That's to be celebrated. I'll confess to a certain amount of ennui regarding the campaign, however.  Maybe it's all the other stuff going on right now, but I'm not really fired up.  I can tell when things are bad when I end up just recycling plots and swiping NPC's from the back of the book.   Bash!  was always meant to be sort of a pick-up, get-me-through-the-divorce kind of RPG ...

My daughter wanted me to run a Bash! session just for the younger members of the group.  She likes her PC, the Lioness, who happens to be a trained martial artist tasked with hunting a group of supernatural villains (similar to Daredevil or Iron Fist from the MCU, or Sara Lance from Legends of Tomorrow).   So, what fun high-stakes adventure with mystical overtones can I possible reconfigure for a superhero episode? I went with arguably the greatest episode of The Real Ghostbusters  animated television show, "Ragnarok and Roll." Jilted boyfriend turned supervillain Jeremy. If you need the rationale as to why "Ragnarok and Roll" is one of the best episodes, this blog post does a good job making the case.  Fun side note: it was written by James Michael Straczynski, who would go onto do Babylon 5 .  I went with the general skeleton of the plot: morbidly depressed Jeremy decides to use a magical flute to not summon Ragnarok (as in the cartoon), but Fimblevi...

I haven't been doing much on this blog for lots of reasons (including major life changes), but it isn't as if I am doing nothing  all this time. My gaming group played their third session of the game Bash! a few weeks ago, a game session that introduced an mysterious NPC group of metahumans (aka the Miscreants), an evil corporation (Kort Technologies, which only now I realize sounds like the Blue Beetle's Kord Technologies.  Damn.), and a handful of villains including Hot Rox, Brute, and Gunfire. Gunfire is the latest NPC swiped from the book The League of Unfortunate Superheroes , the first entry from their modern section.  Gunfire was a DC comics character, part of the company's desperate attempt to catch up with Image and the Iron Age of comics with their "Bloodlines" event that introduced a slew of violently-named gritty "heroes." Gunfire had the curious ability to shoot energy blasts from any object, meaning he could turn a wooden mal...

I've been talking for a while about starting a superhero game now that the previous "home game" of D&D had wrapped up last year.  For a while I had been planning on running Champions, mostly because I thought it would be fun to run a game that meant so much to me as a college student and might promote long-term play. But as it turns out (to the surprise of few) Champions was difficult to teach and difficult to make NPC's.  Between the holidays and a bunch of stuff at home nothing was happening and the game seemed to be stalling out.  But then I found Bash, a fairly simple supers RPG that was easy to teach and easy for me to make villains, etc.  Two weeks ago I ran a test session of Bash, using 1940's WW2 characters. It was a big hit, and suddenly the WW2 session, the PC's the players had been trying to build for Champions, Bash, and the book The League of Regrettable Heroes  all jelled together into what appears to be the first session of a campaign. ...

I had the chance to follow up with several of my players who were present for the one-shot I ran last Friday of Bash! Ultimate Edition .  Many of their insights matched my own (submitted in no particular order): It's a very easy game to pick up.  The one-rule mechanic of X times 2d6 for effect with X being an attribute or a power, usually between 1 and 5 was pretty simple to grasp.  It also made play pretty quick, even with the six players that I had. The dice mechanic is jammy.  "Jammy" is a term that has somehow made into my gaming group's lexicon, meaning that there is a lot of swing in terms of results.  This is especially true because when you roll doubles of any kind, the dice "explode" and have you roll a third die to add to the total.  If it also matches the others, then it explodes again, etc. For example, if you have an Agility of 3 (low superhuman) you can get a result of 9 (two 1's would explode on the roll, so a 1 and 2 is the lowest ...

With all the craziness going on right now, I took some good advice and set aside complicated plans for long campaigns but instead ran a one-shot of Bash , a fairly rules-light superhero RPG. I also took a break from the norm by setting it in the Golden Era of Comics, with the PC's being a group of patriotic superheroes called The Defenders who are called on by FDR himself to battle the Third Reich.  They are led by American Wonder, with his teammates Pyre, Cosmo, Nitro, Haute Couture, and Blind Fury.  By the time the session was done they had battled Nazis, Tiger tanks, and eventually the Nazi's top-secret weapon, the supervillain Ubermensch!  Thankfully they were not alone, being joined at various times by the stubble-jawed Sgt. Brick  and Pat Parker, War Nurse (along with her Girl Commandos)! Pat Parker, War Nurse is an actual comic book heroine from 1946, depicted here in a bit of fan art. Bash is a pretty fun, easy system that my group picked up right aw...